New day, new adventures

I slept well (starting around 8pm and skipped dinner, but it was worth it), and the conference starts tomorrow, so I had all day today to explore and get thoroughly lost in the city and old medina (means "town" in Arabic) all day. And it was exhilarating.

So much to see! I bought an Eyewitness Guide to Morocco in preparation for my trip. Though many swear by the Lonely Planet guides (which my traveling buddy Ves has anyway), my guide has done me well (reconfirmed at end of trip as well). It's not so great for finding hotels and restaurants, as well as many "big picture" details (like where to find walking tours, etc.), but the history sections at the beginning of the guide were incredibly informative, and the pictures and descriptions of the sites are great. Especially important since in Morocco, if there's a non-Arabic description of anything, it's only in French. My Arabic is good enough to pronounce words I see and exchange niceties, and my French is probably just worse than that, so having the guide to give a good description was important in showing myself around town.

I took many pictures of everything I saw... too much to describe individually, though I did what I could on the photos themselves. (Thanks to Ves... I stole many of his pictures too, when his were better). I extracted a pseudo-"best of" and posted them here:
Today was packed full of adventures and mishaps which will no doubt richen my experience. :-) I'm attempting to write a journal of some of these experiences, but doubt I'll have time to keep it up. In the meantime,

• I'm also getting some weird reactions when I say I'm American (like unprompted "don't worry, America and Morocco are good friends"), so I'm now saying my name is Katie and I'm from near London when asked. ;-) So much for doing as the Romans do.